When it comes to the fleet of new Google-related tools, there are those who give them a try without a second thought, those who will wait for the bleeding-edgers to test the water before easing themselves in and finally those who will do everything in their power to avoid Google tools based on stubborn principle. Google Sitemaps was introduced about a year ago and was meant to help improve their index by allowing webmasters to assist with comprehensive spidering by their own efforts. Users could submit all of the individual pages on their website to Google Sitemaps, taking some of the strain off of Google’s crawling efforts. Soon thereafter many webmasters realized that they were being dealt the short stack, not receiving anything in return for submitting these intricate sitemaps.

After some negative feedback, the new and improved Google Sitemaps was introduced – it doesn’t promise to increase your ranking, but it does offer a few handy features that will aid in your quest for relevant SERP rankings. All those webmasters who abandoned it after round one should give it another chance. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain, as it can now be said that there are definite SEO benefits.

You may check your PageRank daily using Google Toolbar. If you have hundreds of pages within your site this is a lot of tedium to endure and there is definitely an easier and more accurate way to keep an eye on your site’s SEO advancements. Using Google Sitemaps you can learn much about your website that you might never have discovered. Statistics reports summarize useful details that will immediately signal to you whether or not you are on the right track and what you can do to reach your goals. The importance of PageRank has been widely debated, but remains a decent barometer of how Google views your site in terms of importance. And the more information that is gathered about your website, the more of a chance you have to gain an edge over your competitors.

Google Sitemaps creates tables of query stats, showing you which searches performed over the last three weeks returned pages from your website and what the highest average position was. It also sheds some light as to which top search queries resulted in click-throughs and which did not. Hopefully, the ones with the most click-throughs will parallel your stats on conversion rates. If you have many top search queries but hardly any click-throughs, then you should focus on increasing your rankings for those.

Google Sitemaps also provides the crawl status of your URLs and how many pages have a high, medium, or low PageRank. It displays which page on your website has had the highest PageRank for the last three months, and has a Common Words section which displays which words commonly appear on your website and which words are the most frequent in inbound, external links. If you’re seeing words in the Common Words list that are not the same as your target keywords, then you should consider rewriting some of your content.

As far as managing your sitemap goes, using Google allows you to change some key attributes. First of all, you can set the priority you want Google to place on particular pages in your site, 0 to 1 (only relative to your site). If you have certain pages within your site that are more important, by giving them high priority you will increase their importance in the eyes of Google. There is a “last modified” timestamp which allows spiders to avoid re-crawling pages that haven’t changed. Also, you can tell Google how often you change a particular page – this is important if you change it very frequently.

All in all, using Google Sitemaps is definitely a proactive move – you are informing them about your new pages rather than sitting around and waiting for spiders to crawl about and discover them on their own. It can be a great gateway for brand new pages that do not have many external links to them. The Internet is drowning in websites and the extra indexing effort is worth the while.

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